Three financial advisors who was shared by Edward Jones in 2023 have launched Uptick Partners, a new support platform designed to help other advisors from captive brokers/traders become independent. They added their first breakout this week.
Longtime Edward Jones advisors Steve Barber, his son Jason Barber and Taylor Pankratz left the storied brokerage after more than four decades to form Nacogdoches, Texas-based Holistic Planning, which now has about $462 million in client assets. All three aim to use their knowledge and experience of the pain points and nuances of leaving a non-protocol and captive broker/dealer like Edward Jones to help others with similar transitions.
“We're really focused on getting people out of the captive broker/dealer space into full RIA independence, but we don't have to make the mistakes we made,” Pankratz said. “We take this analogy of them 'crashing up Mount Everest.' We're helping them lose the obstacles, lose the sticking points, lose the things that can really hold you back.”
“We're one of the only platforms out there that's run by real practitioners—people who've done it themselves,” said Jason Barber.
Holistic Planning operates as an investment advisor representative of Uptick and other advisors joining Uptick will be under its ADV.
Jonathan Dvorak, founder of Dvorak Financial Planning in Cullman, Ala., is the first breakaway advisor to join Uptick. Dvorak manages $275 million in client assets and made the move after 14 years with Edward Jones.
Barber said they are not limited to Edward Jones advisers, but given their experience, they expect advisers from the firm to be natural targets. They will focus on small-town advisers looking to switch from captive firms that are not on the Brokerage Protocol.
“We expect to recruit a lot of people from Edward Jones because, at the end of the day, we are very, very, very knowledgeable about the intricate details associated with an Edward Jones transition,” Barber said. “We've made a lot of mistakes along the way that we're trying to help others avoid, so naturally, we believe this will be attractive to people at our previous company.”
Uptick will provide transition support, a technology stack, back office operational support, human resources, billing, marketing and legal and compliance. Advisors keep 100% of their book of business and receive a 95% fee. Uptick charges a platform fee of between five and 10 basis points, which reduces the more assets an advisor has.
The technology staff will be centered around a customized version of Advyzon and will use Nitrogen, Right Capital, MoneyGuidePro, Presults and Holistiplan.
Uptick will use Pershing as its primary custodian, but will also store some assets with Schwab and Altruist. Barber said one of the main reasons they chose Pershing was his personal DocuSign capabilities. Many other caregivers require clients to have email addresses to sign paperwork, but that's not always possible in the small towns Uptick will focus on.
“In Alabama, not everyone has an email address,” Barber said. “In East Texas, not everyone has an email address. Incidentally, some of those people who don't have email addresses are your best customers.”
With Pershing, they can generate the documents, put them on an iPad, and have a client go to the advisor's office and sign the documents from their machine, without requiring two-factor authentication.
“We call it our 'Car Pickup Experience,'” Barber said.